During the fifty years since President Nixon declared the “War on Cancer”, those inside and outside the cancer community have witnessed the systematic moving of the goalposts attitude to accommodate evidence into an inadequate theory, that is, the Somatic Mutation Theory (SMT). This sorry state promoted a renewable yearly promise that at the end of the next 10-year period the promises uttered in 1971 would become reality. Each failure triggered calls to do more of the same research under the same theory, routinely using more and more sophisticated technology. Meanwhile, in the last few years, an unambiguous general consensus has emerged acknowledging that this overall long, intensive effort has failed, and that it is likely that the solution to the cancer problem resides elsewhere, namely, in alternative theoretical principles of biology. In this essay we concentrate, first, on the big picture, from the philosophical stance (reductionism versus organicism) to the need to adopt rigorous theories. From this novel perspective we conceptualize cancer as a disease of tissue organization akin to development gone awry. Finally, having identified both a promising stance and a useful theory, i.e., the tissue organization field theory (TOFT), we call for abandoning the SMT and for adopting the more promising TOFT.

自尼克松总统宣布“向癌症宣战”以来的 50 年间，癌症界内外的人们目睹了门柱态度的系统移动，以将证据纳入一个不充分的理论，即体细胞突变理论 (SMT)。这个令人遗憾的州推动了一项可更新的年度承诺，即在下一个 10 年期结束时，1971 年的承诺将成为现实。每次失败都会引发人们呼吁在相同的理论下进行更多相同的研究，并经常使用越来越复杂的技术。与此同时，在过去几年中，出现了一个明确的普遍共识，承认这一长期、密集的总体努力已经失败，并且癌症问题的解决方案很可能存在于其他地方，即生物学的替代理论原理中。在这篇文章中，我们首先关注全局，从哲学立场（还原论与有机论）到采用严谨理论的必要性。从这个新颖的角度来看，我们将癌症概念化为一种类似于发育异常的组织组织疾病。最后，在确定了一个有前途的立场和一个有用的理论，即组织组织场理论（TOFT）之后，我们呼吁放弃 SMT 并采用更有前途的 TOFT。